75 Fun Facts and Myths About Shaving
- 0.35 millimeters a day or 1 centimeter per month is the rate at which human hair grows.
- It is estimated that 90% of all adult males shave at least once a day.
- It is also estimated that a man will shave at least 20,000 times in his lifetime.
- The average American male begins to shave between the ages of 14 - 16 years of age.
- Shaving, tweezing or waxing does not cause hair to grow back thicker or fuller.
- Religious convictions account for 7% of all men who don't shave.
- Your hair grows in response to individual biochemistry and hormones. Heredity, genes, race, medications taken, physical and mental stress, and diet influence these hormones.
- Your skin is subject to changes in its resiliency and thickness because of temperature, humidity, diet and stress. This can affect shaving.
- A persons face is composed of an outermost layer of skin that is primarily made up of dead skin cell.
- While shaving, a person removes about as much skin as hair.
- In general a person produces new skin cells every 10 to 20 days.
- When saturated with water, the strength of a single strand of hair is approximately one third to one half less than the strength of dry hair, making it much easier to shave.
- The average person has about 615 hairs per square centimeter.
- Black people have more body hair than asians, but whites have more than blacks.
- Mens facial hair grows at a rate of approximately half an inch per month (6 inches per year).
- The average mans face contains anywhere from 5,000 to 25,000 whiskers.
- Most shaving accidents are caused by using dull and/or dirty razor blades, insufficient preparation of the skin and hair before shaving, and using inappropriate equipment and products
- Facial hair growth rate varies with each man and it even differs with each area on a mans face.
- The average man will spend 60 hours shaving each year.
- On average it takes a man between 100 and 600 strokes to shave his entire face.
- Men spend an average of 5 moths of their lives shaving.
- For men, it would take roughly 16 years of shaving to collect together one pound of hair clippings.
- In general, a man removes over 27 feet of hair in his lifetime through shaving alone.
- Due to a decrease in body fluids in the morning, you should try to avoid shaving first thing when you wake-up.
- Alexander the Great observed that beards could be easily grabbed by the enemy during battle and insisted his troops fight with clean-shaven faces.
- On average 75% men shave their face every day.
- About 15% of men refuse to shave their faces due to the discomfort they experience from shaving.
- Only 3% of all men who abstain from shaving do so because they simply do not care to do so.
- It is estimated that 85% of men who shave, prefer to wet shave.
- 94 million men in the U.S. alone (90 percent of Americas male population) and about 1.6 billion men worldwide age 15 years and older remove hair.
- 1.3 billion of the men in the world shave with a blade and razor.
- When a person shaves while his or her skin is wet, these dead skin cells are removed.
- Cave drawing from as early as 10,000 BC depict both men with clean-shaven faces and those with short beards.
- Ancient Egyptian barbers regularly shaved their clients with razors and pumice stones, as a beard was considered an indication of personal neglect.
- The straight cut-throat blade was introduced in the Middle Ages.
- Peter the Great of Russia imposed a tax on beards, which was collected at every town gate.
- Body hair usually grows out from an individuals skin at a 30 to 60 degree angle.
- The first safety razor was patented in 1901 and more than 25 million blades are sold in the UK every year.
- The world's oldest existing barber's is Truefitt and Hill in St James'Street, London, which opened in 1805.
- A man spends 3,300 hours or 138 days of his life shaving his whiskers.
- Just 1 per cent of men enjoy their daily shave, with 99 per cent regarding it as an annoying chore.
- Wet shaving is still the most popular method of shaving in the UK.
- Hair grows faster during the day than at night.
- The ideal shave angle (razor blade meeting the face) is 28-32 degrees.
- Hair on the neck grows parallel to the skin.
- Shaving cream was only made for men until the industry specifically targeted women in 1986 by manufacturing the whipped magic specifically for women!
- 42% of men report that they have no facial hair.
- 34% say they have a moustache, 19% with sideburns, 17% have a goatee, 6% have a full beard, and 3% have a soul patch.
- The majority of men, 84%, shave at the sink. Another 15% of men shave in the shower.
- Men between the ages of 18 and 24 shave an average of four times a week.
- Men over the age of 35 shave an average of six times a week.
- The average man will have spent 900 hours shaving (the equivalent of 37 1/2 days) between ages 15 and 75.
- The average man begins to shave regularly when he begins to work regularly.
- The average man spends 10-15 hours a year shaving.
- 1680 is the year in which the first narrow-bladed folding straight razor was introduced.
- The average shave lasts 3.5 minutes.
- The average shave will trim away somewhere between 20,000-25,000 hairs from a mans face.
- Shaving cream didnt always come in aerosol cans; the method wasnt even introduced until 1950.
- The Pharaohs of Egypt probably liked a good shave every now and then, of course using nothing less than the best made from gold and silver. Archeologists have found razor relics that date back as far as the fourth century.
- There are about 30,000 beard hairs on the face of the average manthe greatest concentration on the chin and upper lip.
- About 30% of men who shave use an electric device to shave.
- When a man wet shaves, its as good as using an exfoliating product because the process removes dead skin cells promoting healthier skin.
- Archeologists believe that caveman used clams and shark teeth to shave with, 20,000 years ago-in the Stone Age!
- Nearly 70% of American women prefer a clean-shaven man.
- The Reason Fidel Castro originally grew his beard is because his supply of Gillette Blades was cut off.
- Some archeologists think that many warriors shaved their heads before battles so opponents didnt have any hair to pull maybe they were discouraging the practice of scalping?
- Marketing campaign convinced the women of North America to shave their body hair. Notably, women in the other parts of the world do not engage on masse in this ritual. Even in French Canada, the habit is not largely undertaken. It all began with the May, 1915 edition of Harper's Bazaar magazine that featured a model sporting the latest fashion. She wore a sleeveless evening gown that exposed, for the first time in fashion, her bare shoulders, and her armpits.
- 10 feet the length of the longest mustache on record grown by Birger Pellas of Sweden.
- 17.5 feet the length of the longest beard on record grown by Hans Langseth of Norway.
- Old Spice is the bestselling after-shave in the United States.
- Shave gels werent even thought of until the 1970s.
- Pseudofolliculitisbarbae is th the medical term for razor burn.
- A young marketing executive with the Wilkinson Sword Company, who also made razor blades for men, designed a campaign to convince the women of North America that: (a) Underarm hair was unhygienic, (b) It was unfeminine. In two years, the sales of razor blades doubled as our grandmothers and great grandmothers made themselves conform to this socially constructed gender stereotype. This norm for North American women has been reinforced by several generations of daughters who role modeled their mothers.
- It is false that human hair continues to grow after death.
- 5 million is the number of hair follicles covering the human body.
